All for Nothing
by TheVillianousNoble
Summary: Colin Singleton thinks that everything is going right for him. He's free from the curse of Katherine's and Lindsey Lee Wells seems the perfect girl for him. Although, it seems that the sitzpinkler prodigy is about to find the worst moment of his life has come. Will he find the perfect word in his vast vocabulary to describe this devastating day? All rights go to John Green! R&R


**A/N – Please note that this ending is EXTREMELY similar to the original. Only one thing has changed, which impacts the whole story for Colin's adventures. I hope you enjoy, please review!**

Lindsey and Hollis beat them home, on account of how Colin and Hassan had to stop at Hardee's for a Monster Thickburger. As they stood in the Pink Mansion's living room, Hollis said, "Lindsey went to spend the night at her friend Janet's. She was pretty broken up on the car ride home. It's about the boy, I guess."

Hassan nodded, and sat down on the sectional couch with her. Colin's brain started working. He had to find an unsuspicious way out of the Pink Mansion as soon as possible, he realized.

"Can I do anything to help you?" asked Hassan, and Hollis brightened and said, "Sure, sure. You can sit here with me and brainstorm-all night, if you've the time." And Hassan said, "Cool."

Colin sort of half-coughed, and started speaking rapidly. "I may go out for a while. I think I'm going to go camping. I'll probably sitzpinkler out and sleep in the car, but still-I'm gonna give it a try."

"What?" asked Hassan, incredulous.

"Camping," Colin said.

"With the pigs and the hornets and the TOCs and the whatnot?"

"Yes, camping," said Colin, and then he tried to give Hassan an extremely meaningful look.

After staring back quizzically for a moment, Hassan's eyes shot open, and he said, "Well, I'm not going with you. As we've learned, I'm an inside cat."

"Keep your phone on," Hollis said. "Do you have a tent?"

"No, but it's pretty out and I'll just take a sleeping back if that's all right."

And then before Hollis could further object, he climbed the stairs two at a time, grabbed his supplies, and headed out.

It was early evening-the fields receding into a pink invisibility as they rose back into the horizon. Colin felt his heart slamming in his chest. He wondered if she even wanted to see him. He'd taken "sleeping over at Janet's" as a hint, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe she really was sleeping at Janet's, whoever that was-which would mean a lot of hiking for naught.

After five minutes of driving, he reached the fenced-in field that had once been home to Hobbit the horse. He climbed over the tri-logged fence and jogged across the field. Colin, of course, did not believe in running when walking would suffice-but here and now, walking would not. He slowed down, however, as he made his way up the hill, the flashlight a thin and shaky beam of yellow light against the darkening landscape. He kept it directly before him as he picked through bushes and vines and trees, the thick rotting floor of the forest crunching beneath his feet, reminding him of where we all go. To seed, to ground. And even then he couldn't help but anagram. To ground-Run, Godot; Donor Gut. And the magic through which "the ground" can become "donor gut," combined with his newfound feeling that he had at some recent point received a donor gut, kept his pace quick. Even as the darkness became so complete that trees and rocks became not objects but mere shadows, he climbed, until finally he reached the stone outcropping. He walked along the rock, his flashlight scanning up and down, until the light passed over the crack. He leaned his head in and said, "Lindsey?"

There was no response, just silence. He raised his eyebrow, peeking inside the dark crack of darkness. "Are you in there? I know you told your mom you were sleeping at Janet's, but, I thought you might be here instead," he continued hesitantly. Still nothing. Colin squeezed through the jagged crack and shuffled sideways until he reached the room. A flashlight was left turned on on the ground, its light blinding him as he evaluated his musty surroundings. Stupidly, he hoped to see that dazzling smile, the smile that he knew could end wars and cure cancer with just one glance at those pearly white teeth. Instead, he saw the exact opposite of what he daydreamed in his prodigious brain.

His flashlight pointed first at an empty corner. Then he drew a line to the other side, like he was bringing an airplane into the gate. Instead of another relatively vacant ridge, Colin finally realized what true heartbreak really was, even after dumping one Katherine, and being dumped by the other eighteen. Lindsey Lee Wells, the 'princess' with chocolate eyes who reigned from the 'kingdom' of Gutshot, Kentucky. The princess was slumped against the stone wall, not at all with the poor-postured poise that she normally had during the time and Hassan and Colin knew her. There was blood seeping from underneath her, soaking his white run-down sneakers in sticky, warm crimson. A putrid odour was already staining the air inside the cave.

Gradually, slower than Colin had ever processed anything mentally in his life, he was struck with the horrific realization of what he just discovered. A corpse, and a fresh one at that. Their eyes were glassy and open, cinnamon eyes with not a hint of cheerful light in then, along with long, chestnut hair streaked in hauntingly beautiful red. Lindsey was dead, it was just too obvious at this point. And, like "the most special, magnificent, brilliant boy" he was just a day before the fated road trip with Hassan, he puked his guts out. He never wanted to know what a chewed-up Monster Thickburger looked like after sitting in your stomach for approximately an hour. The stench overflowed in his nostrils, the taste of his vomit making him want to gag even more. He just couldn't believe that he actually found Lindsey, cold and dead instead of warm and alive.

Colin wondered what the actual fug could have led to this. He couldn't see any immediate object that could have led to her demise, so it couldn't have been suicide. He racked his brain, wondering who could possibly have a thing against the nicest, sweetest girl in Gutshot. Perhaps TOC, as revenge for her breaking up with him when she found out about his affair with Katrina? Colin just didn't see that as a possibility, as he already had his vengeance when he beat up Hassan and him on their hunting trip. After staring at Lindsey for so long, the gears and clockwork that made his brain function began slowing down, as though they were clogged with the despair he felt over her death.

He took a deep breath, kneeling down next to Lindsey's corpse, his jeans ripping from the sharp pebbles that littered the bottom of the cave where she hadn't already set up a bunch of blankets to make the area much cozier. Reaching for the flashlights, he flicked them off.

"Out, damn light," he said, and it darkness began its reign yet again.

Colin wondered if Lindsey was even upset over what happened over the past week, with TOC's cheating and Hollis's secrets. With TOC, it was completely possible, in the prodigy's mind, that she didn't even care. About him, TOC, about his liking her, about his screwing Katrina. It seemed to be so easy for her to dismiss, yet totally heart shattering at the very same time. Over the past three days, she seemed to be able to easily distract herself from everything, but Colin didn't view her as suicidal or anything of that sort, and he didn't see why TOC would kill her. Whatever happened, the result was still the same. Lindsey Lee Wells was never going to return to him. He remembered when she told him that unlike her, TOC was real. To Colin, he was just boring, even by his own personal standards. She seemed to be so pissed off about it, perhaps because she thought she wasted so much of her life with him when he cheats on her, even though she isn't even depressed about it.

Colin always thought that people are supposed to care. It's good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they're gone. He had a feeling that she didn't miss TOC at all. The gears began turning faster than usual. Maybe she only liked the idea of being his girlfriend? What a goddamned waste, he realized. There's Hollis, really doing something for people. She works all the goddamned time and now it has been revealed that it's not for herself; it's for all these fugging people in Sunset Acres who get a pension that pays for their diapers. And it's for everybody at the factory.

The oldsters at Sunset Acres… how would they react to this horrible tragedy? Then again, they like her as they remember her from years ago, not the her before her death.

Lindsey used to sometimes imply that she was the most self-centred person in the world, but Colin realized that the horrific title really belonged to himself. He wondered what she would have said to this, picturing the image behind closed eyelids.

"Didn't you stay behind Hassan and let, like, a thousand hornets sting you?" she said in Colin's daydream.

He spoke out loud without realizing. "Oh. Yeah. There was that. Okay, you're the most self-centred person after all. But I'm close!"

There was only silence, so he continued. He wasn't even aware that he was speaking to a corpse, while also slipping away into the depths of madness, the cracks of insanity. "How do you fix it, Lindsey?"

"That's what I was thinking about before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."

"You don't even know why you need to be world-famous; you just think you do."

"Yeah. Exactly. We're in the same boat, Colin Singleton. But it didn't really fix the problem, getting popular."

"I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost. Like getting TOC to date you doesn't fix the Alpo event. I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing. Like Katherine. That's what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn't fill the hole that losing her created."

"Maybe no girl can fill it."

"Right. Being a world-famous Theorem-creator wouldn't, either. That's what I've been thinking, that maybe life is not about accomplishing some stupid markers." Lindsey's voice laughed in his head, interrupting him. "Wait, what's funny?"

"Nothing it's just, like-I was thinking that your realization is like if a heroin addict suddenly said, 'You know, maybe instead of always doing more heroin, I should, like, not do heroin."

Colin stayed silent at that. How come, he wondered, is it that things never turn out the way you want them to, the way you dream them up in your head? He closed his eyes again, not wanting to lose her again.

"Did I tell you I dumped one of the Katherines?" he asked timidly, fearing that she left.

"You what? No," Lindsey's voice miraculously remained.

"I did, apparently. Katherine the Third. I just completely misremembered it. I mean, I always assumed that all the things I did remember were true."

"Huh."

"What?"

"Well, but it's not as good a story if you dumped her. That's how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don't fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don't see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky. Hassan told me once that you think like that, too-that you see the connections everywhere-so you're a natural born storyteller, it turns out."

"I never thought about it like that. I-huh. It makes sense."

"So tell me the story."

"What? The whole thing?"

"Yeah. Romance, adventure, morals, everything."

The Beginning, and the Middle, and the End

"Katherine I was the daughter of my tutor Krazy Keith, and she asked me to be her boyfriend one night at my house, and I said yes, and then about two minutes and thirty seconds later she dumped me, which seemed funny at the time, but now, in retrospect, it's possible that those two minutes and thirty seconds were among the most significant time periods of my life.

"K-2 was a slightly pudgy eight-year-old from school, and she showed up at my house one day and said there was a dead rat in the alley and, being eight, I ran outside to see the dead rat, but instead I found only her best friend Amy, and Amy said, 'Katherine likes you and will you be her boyfriend?' and I said yes, and then eight days later Amy showed up at my door again to say that Katherine didn't like me anymore and wouldn't be going out with me from there on out.

"Katherine III was a perfectly charming little brunette whom I met at my first summer at smart-kid camp, which would in time come to be the place for child prodigies to pick up chicks, and since it makes a better story, I choose to remember that she dumped me one morning on the archery course after this math prodigy named Jerome ran in front of her bow and fell to the ground, claiming that he'd been shot by Cupid's arrow.

"Katherine IV, aka Katherine the Red, was a mousy redhead with red plastic-rimmed glasses whom I met in Suzuki violin lessons and she played beautifully and I played hardly at all because I could never be bothered to practice and so after four days she dumped me for a piano prodigy named Robert Vaughan who ended up playing a solo concert at Carnegie Hall when he was eleven, so I guess she made the right call there.

"In fifth grade, I went out with K-5, widely reputed to be the nastiest girl in school because she always seemed to be the one who started lice outbreaks, and she kissed me on the lips out of nowhere during recess one day while I was trying to read Huck Finn in the sandbox, and that was my first kiss, and later that day she dumped me because boys were gross.

"Then after a six-month dry spell, I met Katherine XI during my third year at smart-kid summer camp, and we went together for a record seventeen days and she was excellent at both pottery and pull-ups, two fields of endeavor at which I have never excelled, and although between us we could have made an unstoppable force of intelligence and upper-body strength and coffee mug-making, she dumped me anyway.

"And then came middle school and the severe unpopularity commenced in earnest, but the nice thing about being on the near end of the cool curve is that periodically people will take pity on you, such as sixth grade's Katherine the Kind, a sweetheart who wore a frequently snapped training bra and whom everyone called pizza face due to an acne problem that wasn't even that bad, and who eventually broke up with me not because she realized I was damaging what miniscule social standing she had but because she felt that our month-long relationship had hurt my academic pursuits, which she believed to be very important.

"The eighth wasn't quite so sweet, and maybe I should have known it since her name, Katherine Barker, anagrams into Heart Breaker, Ink, like she's a veritable CEO of Dumping, but anyway she asked me out on a date and then I said yes and then she called me a freak and said I didn't have any pubes and that she would never seriously go out with me-all of which, to be fair, was true.

"K-9 was in sixth grade when I was in seventh, and she was by far the best-looking Katherine o date with her cute chin and the dimples in her cheeks, and her skin was perennially tan, not unlike you, and she thought that dating an older man might be god for her social status, but she was wrong.

"Katherine X-and yes by then I had realized certainly that this was an awfully odd statistical anomaly, but I wasn't actively pursuing Katherines so much as I was actively pursuing girlfriends-was a smart-kid-summer-camp conquer, and I won her heart by, you guessed it, running in front of her bow on the archery course and claiming I'd been shot by Cupid's arrow, and she was the first girl I ever French-kissed, and I didn't know what to do so I sort of kept darting my tongue out from behind closed lips like I was a snake, and it didn't take very much of that for her to want to be just friends.

"K-11 wasn't so much a dating thing as a going-to-the-movies-once-and-holding-hands-

and-then-me-calling-and-her-mother-saying-she-wasn't-home-and-then-her-never-calling-me-

back thing, but I'd argue it counts, due to hand-holding and also due to the fact that she called me a genius.

"At the start of the second semester of ninth grade, a new girl showed up from New York and she was as rich as they come, but she hated being rich and loved The Catcher in the Rye, and she said I reminded her of Holden Caulfield, presumably because we were both self-absorbed losers, and she liked me because I knew a lot of languages and had read a lot of books, and then she broke up with me after twenty-five days because she wanted a boyfriend who didn't spend so much time reading and learning languages.

"By then I had met Hassan, and for about ten years, I'd had an obsessive crush on this brunette with blue eyes from school whom I'd always called Katherine the Best and Hassan played like Cyrano and told me exactly how to woo her because as we know from Katrina, Hassan is actually quite good at that stuff, and it worked and I loved her and she loved me and it lasted for three months, until November of tenth grade, when she finally broke up with me because she said, and I am quoting directly here, that I was both 'too smart and too dumb' for her, which marked the beginning of Katherines having ridiculous, idiotic, and frequently oxymoronic reasons for breaking up with me.

"A pattern that continued with the always-clad-in-black Katherine XIV, who I met that spring when she came up to me at a coffee shop and asked if I was reading Camus, which I was, and I said I was, and then she asked if I had ever read Kierkegaard, and I said I had because I had, and then by the time we left the coffee shop we were holding hands and her phone number was in my brand-new cell phone, and she like to take me for walks on the lakeshore, where we'd watch the waves crashing against the rocks on the shoreline, and she said there was only one metaphor, and that the metaphor was water beating against rocks-because, she said, both the water and the rocks ended up worse off in the bargain, and then when she dumped me in the same coffee shop where we'd met three months before, she said she was the water and I was the rocks and we were just going to keep going at each other till there was nothing left of either of us-and when I pointed out that, really, the water doesn't suffer any negative effects whatsoever from slowly eroding the rocks on the lakeshore, she allowed as to how that was true but dumped me anyway.

"And then that summer at camp I met K-15, who had that kind of puppy-dog face with the big brown eyes and drooping eyelids that just sort of made you want to take care of her, only she didn't want me to take care of her, because she was a very empowered feminist who liked me because she thought I was the great mind of my generation, but then she decided I would never be-and again I'm quoting-'an artist,' which was apparently cause for dismissal even though I had never claimed to be an artist-and in fact if you have listened closely you have already heard me freely admit that I suck at pottery.

"And then after a horrendous dry spell, I met Katherine XVI on the roof deck of a hotel in Newark, New Jersey, during an Academic Decathlon tournament in October of my junior year, and we had about as wild and torrid an affair as you can possibly have over the course of fourteen hours at an Academic Decathlon tournament, which is to say that at one point we had to kick her three roommates out of her hotel room so we could make out properly, but then even after I emerged from the tournament with nine gold medals-I sucked at Speech-she dumped me on account of how she had a boyfriend in Kansas and she didn't want to dump him, so I was the next logical person to dump.

"Katherine XVII I met-I'm not going to lie about it-on the Internet the next January, and she had a pierced nose with a ring in it and had this immensely impressive vocabulary with which she was able to talk about indie rock-one of the words she used that I didn't initially know the definition of was, in fact, 'indie'-and it was fun to listen to her talk about music and one time I helped her dye her hair, but then she broke up with me after three weeks because I was sort of 'emo nerd' and she was more looking for 'emo core.'

"While I generally don't like to use the word 'heart' unless I'm referring to the blood-pumping, beat-beat-beating organ, there's no question that Katherine XVIII broke my heart, because I loved her immensely from the very moment I saw her at the concert Hassan made me attend during Spring Break, and she was this short fiery woman who hated being called a girl, and she liked me and at first it seemed she shared my massive sense of insecurity, and so I just built up my hopes ridiculously and found myself writing her these extravagantly long and painfully philosophical emails, and then she dumped me over email after only two actual dates and four actual kisses, whereupon I found myself writing her these extravagantly long and painfully pathetic emails.

"And just two weeks after that, Katherine I showed up on my doorstep and soon enough she became K-19, and she was a nice girl with a good heart who liked helping people, and none of them ever lit my heart-God, I can't stop it with that word now-on fire like she did, but I just needed her so much and it never felt like enough and she wasn't consistent and her inconsistency and my insecurity were this horrible match for each other, but I still loved her, because all of me was wrapped up in her, because I'd put all my eggs in someone else's basket, and in the end, after 343 days, I was left with an empty basket and this gnawing endless hole in my gut, but then now I find myself deciding to remember her as a good person with whom I had some good times until we, both of us, got ourselves into an ineradicable bad situation.

"And the moral of the story is that you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. And the second moral of the story,if a story can have multiple morals, is that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees-breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; it's something that happens with you."

Silence ensued after Colin's story came to its inspiring conclusion. He knew that Lindsey really was now gone, that the voice he heard was just a fragment of his imagination, but he wondered if she would have enjoyed his story, either physically next to him or even looking down at him Heaven.

After what may have been a million years past, Colin climbed out of the crack, taking out his cell phone as he looked back at his car, Satan's Hearse. Oh, what a story he had for the police, Hollis, and Hassan.


End file.
